I advise the CEOs and CTOs of our portfolio of 145 companies and almost as many industries, on all matters product, technical, AI, sales, and people.Fractal is a venture studio that produces B2B vertical SaaS companies (think software for cemetery management or marijuana farmers).If you're a great engineer who wants to be a founder and CTO, hit me up! We'll help you find a co-founder, a vetted business idea, fund you, and help you succeed!

Architected and delivered the OpenGov's Workforce product.Designed and built next-generation, market-leading budgeting tools for local governments and states across the country–big ones with big budgets, and little ones with little budgets.Making a positive impact in communities by stretching their tax dollars further than ever before.

I was the founding engineer of a secure payment platform that connected a variety of common physical payment peripherals (e.g. magstripe readers and Apple Pay) to a variety of backends and payment processors (e.g. Vantiv and Cayan).SDKs in multiple target languages made requests to a middleware daemon that managed and marshaled data between the payments hardware, SDK, and secure transaction database in the cloud.While I got worryingly good at doing DUKPT encryption and reading large blocks of hex, the insanely simple SDK API and PCI-DSS compliant transaction database were completely my design and what I'm most proud of.Primary tech: Golang, C++, Node, Linux, Docker, Heroku, AWS=== More about that database ===The transaction database was modeled after how Git works internally. Transactions (e.g. authorize a payment, settle it, refund it) followed a simple and strict FSM, were built up over a series of cryptographically signed request/response commits, to a fast, immutable (!) database that could easily be audited, sharded, and warehoused.Sensitive data (e.g. encrypted payment data) was kept in-flight and never stored, unique data was never duplicated over the life of a transaction, yet was totally retained and easy to find, and transactions were designed to easily generalize to different needs by adding new FSM states and transitions.Records were easy to reason about with few redundant or one-off fields, and it was trivial to add third party peripherals and payment backends without migrations (e.g. adding a bajillion custom columns). I only store versioned raw responses, unmarshaling them on-demand to get necessary data to perform the next step of a transaction.Lastly, many APIs in the SDK only took one argument, a correlation ID for the entire set of transactions. Everything needed would be looked up.These details are small, and perhaps obvious, but together they're powerful and the polar opposite of what you usually see (in e.g. Stripe's API).

Yes, I really was the technical lead at a used car dealership.* Added useful processes to improve how the team worked (JIRA, Slack, code review tools, Git hooks, etc.)* Standardized tech across the org; eliminated expensive, complicated, fragile, and insecure infrastructure* Added one-click deploys, continuous integration, production smoke testing, and monitoring* Improved security everywhere I could (1Password for Teams, Two Factor Auth, OAuth, TLS, DNSSEC, etc.)Primary tech: Node, Python, Linux, Heroku=== Details ===My focus here was simplifying, automating, and securing infrastructure and processes so the team could stay focused on business problems and not technological ones. Every day I looked for neglected problems on the team, in the tech, and across the company – things people accepted as being a certain way or were forgotten, and /really/ try to categorically eliminate them. There were a lot of fragmented systems when I started -- inconsistent and poor code quality, no testing, lack of architectural design, staging environments, APIs that went down frequently, cron jobs that never ran, no backups, and shared passwords that were reset multiple times a day. It was a mess.By the time I left, we could deploy a brand new app/experiment in *minutes* that: had secure access to all of the backend resources, was ready to scale, could be tested in multiple environments before ever seeing staging, ran the same locally as it did in production, and went go through a rigorous code review because the team believed it mattered.

Sparky is a line of pet products for the space age! An ecosystem of wearables and home automation for dogs.* Designed the product line, fleshed out and prototyped the first hardware and software product.* Researched the pet market, gave user interviews, wrote a funding pitch and business strategies.* Found advisors and an experienced hardware cofounder – though ultimately the timing wasn’t right for him.

* Supported OpenROV underwater robotics kits by writing and testing build instructions.* Designed and implemented quality control procedures for kit packing and fulfillment.

* Worked on a pure CoffeeScript/JavaScript game engine for first-party browser RTS.* Lead efforts to set up our Node.js serving infrastructure, production tools/processes with Amazon Web Services.* Wrote a C++ extension for Node.js to dynamically load 3D models on our servers to send over the wire to clients.* Developed/maintained numerous internal tools in CoffeeScript/Node.js, e.g. analytics, publishing, serving, etc.* Contributed tools and processes for ensuring team code quality, documentation, release-engineering, etc.

* Developed the in-game visual tools the designers used for interactive world building.* Lead ongoing efforts to identify and optimize overall game performance, especially of the renderer.* Wore as many game-client-related hats as could be stacked on head without toppling over.

* Lead the development of the Flash document reader until company transition to HTML5* Lead the research/development of a secure document conversion system and licensing server for enterprises

* Large internal rewrites to improve actual and perceived performance.* Improved start-up time, animation/transition smoothness, and memory/CPU utilization.* Design/implementation of modular components (e.g. webcam) for social media marketing campaigns.

* Flex and ActionScript compiler engineer, specializing in compile-time performance* Flex SDK engineer, specializing in development tools and runtime performance* Design/implementation of open source strategy for Flex SDK and other Adobe projects* Stints on Flex/Flash Builder (Eclipse) and Flash Player teams – I’ve touched everything Flash-related.* Attended many, many, meetings, from strategy to bug/feature prioritization; assured that they build character.

Developed a bytecode (dis)assembler for testing the ActionScript 3 Virtual Machine’s verifier.

Developed the MzTake scriptable debugger/program monitor for Scheme.